A motor vehicle internal combustion engine includes a plurality of combustion chambers each delimited by a piston, a cylinder and a portion of a cylinder head. These combustion chambers receive a mixture of fuel and combustion-supporting gas to be burned to generate the work of the engine. The combustion-supporting gas includes air, which may be compressed or not, depending on whether the engine includes a turbocompressor or not. The air may moreover be mixed with exhaust gas referred to as recirculated exhaust gas. The gas fed into the combustion chamber will be referred to hereinafter as feed gas.
It is known to increase the density of this feed gas by cooling it, for example by encouraging an exchange of heat between the feed gas and a stream of air external to the vehicle by means of an air/air heat exchanger.
It is also known to effect this cooling by exchange of heat between the feed gas and a so-called coolant, for example taking the form of a liquid that circulates in a heat exchanger through which the feed gas passes.
In the former case, the heat exchanger is installed inside a housing which delimits the intake circuit with respect to the air around the internal combustion engine. This housing may be made from a plastic material, for example, and the heat exchanger is then accommodated in this plastic material housing. However, this type of plastic housing proves not to be resistant to the high temperatures that may be encountered, notably when the internal combustion engine is equipped with a turbocompressor and/or if the internal combustion engine uses diesel oil as fuel.
This situation has been overcome by the use of metal housings produced by a casting process. The heat exchanger then has thick walls and is capped by a cast inlet box and a cast outlet box for the feed gas. The intake housing is then made airtight by welding the inlet box and the outlet box to the thick walls of the heat exchanger. Such a solution, although satisfactory from the point of view of withstanding thermal loads, is costly to implement, notably because of the use of cast components. Moreover, there are numerous assembly steps, and this adds to the cost of this component.